Houston immigrants become opera protagonists

The Houston Grand Opera puts on Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio in July. The HGO is about to stage an opera soon that’s decidedly more current: the story of Houston’s immigrant experience.

In a gesture to move beyond our regular bubble, my husband bought tickets to the opera last year. It was a Russian opera, and I sort of felt like Bill Murray in this scene from Lost in Translation as I sat there (next to a woman who was snoring, yes ever so gently snoring in her velvet and pearls). I mean, it seemed like there were plenty more words being sung than what appeared in the translation being projected above the performers. Anyway, so we’re not opera regulars but since we bought those tickets we’re now on the Houston Grand Opera’s mailing list and get their quarterly magazine, Opera Cues. So we got the Summer 2007 issue Wednesday and I started flipping through it at dinner and came across an article about a new opera that will hit very close to home, where the protaganists will be Houston’s immigrants. It isn’t posted online but if it was it would be here.

Anyway, here’s some of the article:

The concept for HGOco and Song of Houston was born early in 2006, when HGO’s then-new general director and CEO Anthony Freud, a native of Britain, sat down with an opera patron and began asking questions about the city he’d just claimed as his own. In the course of the conversation it became clear to him that Houston was in many ways a quintessential American city, a product of immigration that had never ceased welcoming immigrants. HGO should do something to reflect that, he thought, and the idea for what was then called Song of Houston emerged. At the time, Song of Houston was simply envisioned as a musical work that would tell the stories of different Houston immigrant communities. Soon, however, the concept of Song of Houston grew, even as the musical work was given a new name, The Refuge.

Inspired by the true story of a family’s journey from El Salvador to Houston, The Refuge presents a collection of individual journeys from six of Houston’s immigrant communities — African, Central American, Indian and Pakistani, Mexico, Soviet-era Jewish and Vietnamese.

It premieres at the Wortham Center in downtown Houston Nov. 10. Another part of the Song of Houston program was a recent National Geographic Photo Camp where teenagers who came to the country as immigrants documented their new lives in Houston. Chronicle photgraphers participated in that. Those pics will be featured at the opera’s debut. I’m curious to see the opera and the pics and expect I won’t be so lost in the translation this time around.

2 Responses

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities.

“heavy immigration will inflict social deterioration for decades to come, harming immigrants as well as the native-born.”

Patrons of the arts! Have you not already PAID ENOUGH IN YOUR TAXES FOR SOCIAL SERVICES W/OUT PAYING TO WATCH THEM PERFORM ON THE STAGE-their pitiful plights fr oppressed countries in which they chose to do NOTHING other than run to U.S.? WHEN are Texans going to learn the difference between “alien” vs “immigrant”? And put on by a “Brit” on top of it all-remember the FIRST WAR;I recall against the Brits??As if they have their own country under control???